The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of English are pleased to announce the 2007 UF Conference on Games and Digital Media: "World Building: Space and Community," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 1-2, 2007, in conjunction with the annual Conference on Comics, which will be March 3-4.

This third annual conference on games will focus on the construction of digital worlds, with particular emphasis on the various spatialities of games and other digital media. We are especially interested in spatiality as it is employed in the construction of virtual worlds both in terms of the graphemic representation of game objects, as well as the dual role these spaces perform as both narrative structures and sites of play. We are also interested in spatiality as it relates to the development of social space (including online spaces like World of Warcraft and gaming message boards) as well as the relationship of real-world locations like arcades and game cafes to the play experience.

Confirmed speakers include Scott Jennings, senior designer for NCSoft and writer for The Rantings of Lum The Mad and Broken Toys, ARG designer Dave Szulborski, and Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages and co-editor of the New Media Reader.

Abstract submissions should be approximately 250-500 words in length. Presentations will be 15 minutes with 5 minutes of question and answer. The deadline for abstract submissions is January 1st, 2007. Abstracts should be submitted via the conference website at http://www.english.ufl.edu/worlds . Please direct all questions to sandifer@english.ufl.edu <mailto:sandifer@english.ufl.edu>.